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Research Outline

Prepared for Tom P. | Delivered May 27, 2020

Cloud Gaming and Gaming Portfolios of Wireless Carriers

Goals

To identify insights on Cloud Gaming and the Gaming Portfolios of Wireless Carriers in the US (specifically for AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, C-Spire), particularly, to understand what their current Gaming portfolio includes, what they have announced for Cloud Gaming (current offering and roadmap), if Mobile Edge Computing is included in their Cloud Gaming plans, and what have they announced for AR/VR Gaming (current offering and roadmap). This will be used for a presentation.

Early Findings

Verizon

  • In 2019, Verizon started to work on Verizon Gaming, a cloud gaming platform that lets users stream video games directly to their Android smartphones and other devices.
  • Currently, Verizon is testing its cloud gaming service on the NVIDIA Shield Android TV.
  • Verizon Gaming allows users to PlayStation 4 games, such as "Red Dead Redemption," "Grand Theft Auto V," "Fortnite," and "God of War". They have also made more than 135 games available for streaming.
  • Verizon hopes to fix lag and high latency issues in their game streaming services and also aims to bring it to mobile.
  • Verizon's 5G mobile-data infrastructure would provide a more stable connection to stream games or deliver games at high speeds.
  • Edge computing is one of the main components of Verizon’s 5G network strategy.
  • A report by RootMetrics found that Verizon provided very "fast download speeds and extremely low packet loss" and jitter results, but it had a very high latency measurement.
  • The RootMetrics test indicated that Verizon's 5G had a median download speed of 254.7 Mbps. They concluded that "Verizon’s mmWave 5G showed incredible potential, and 5G gamers shouldn’t see any issues from speed, packet loss, or jitter.”
  • The Verizon team also "built and tested an independent GPU-based orchestration system and developed enterprise mobility capabilities that will revolutionize mobility for virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (XR), augmented reality (AR), and cinematic reality (CR) and provide a platform for developing ultra low-latency cloud gaming, and enable the development of scalable GPU cloud-based services."

Summary

  • For the initial hour, we mainly focused on gathering early insights on Verizon's efforts in Cloud Gaming and their gaming portfolio and described what we could find above.
  • We can continue the research to identify insights for AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, and C-Spire. Please let us know in a comment below if more information on Verizon is of interest.
  • Feel free to select or add an option below.